The Dogwoods

The dogwoods stand among the still winter-gold grasses, red on gold, defiantly, though everything will soon succumb to green, to fecundity, to the leaves just now budding on the dogwood stems, to the shoots hidden beneath the litter of the grass, and to the evergreen of the forest, the scrambling junipers, the saplings of spruce and balsam, the outliers of a green that will soon permit no red and gold to mar it.